A need exists for a multi-tenant multi-user multi-airline cargo consolidation and processing center for processing air-eligible cargo that has a small footprint structure with multiple vertical levels, each level owned, leased, rented, or used at least in part by a company, with such cargo consolidation and processing center operably connected to an airport. The cargo consolidation and processing center provides a higher and better use of scarce airport land to process greater volumes of air cargo freight and mail on small land parcels.
Air cargo is a trade facilitator that contributes to global economic development and creating over 68 million jobs worldwide, 11.5 million of which are in the U.S. or 7.8% of all U.S. jobs. The global economy depends on the ability to reliably deliver not only e-commerce consumer products, but all kinds of high-quality, high-value, time-sensitive and perishable products fast and economically at competitive prices to consumers worldwide. Air cargo transports over US $7 trillion worth of goods, accounting for approximately 35% of world trade by value.
Dependency on air transport to deliver goods associated with e-commerce will layer new volumes of cargo onto the air transport industry, putting greater throughput pressure on aviation infrastructure. The global economy and the creation of millions of new jobs are dependent on a healthy, thriving air cargo industry, but most gateway airports in the world, and especially in the U.S. are not able to keep pace. The nature of global commerce is also changing, casting new light on the merits of air transport and its advantaged importance as the most reliable mode of delivering goods faster and more economically than ever imagined before.
Most U.S. gateway airports (and many European gateway airports) are based on old and outdated infrastructure and are severely land constrained, creating operational bottlenecks and chokes on air cargo flow capacities and efficiencies, thus not keeping pace with global air cargo trade growth. Future cargo throughput functional interdependencies cannot be efficiently or economically accommodated by the functionally and operationally obsolete box-structured single-story cargo facility warehouses that are sometimes without aircraft adjacency, in most cases without adequate landside, planning for modern 53′ truck trailers, and without appropriate cargo security systems posing increased probability of human and material losses associated especially with the increasing transport of cargo-borne explosives and lethal materials in belly holds of modern wide-body passenger aircraft.
To provide viable solutions meeting cargo volume throughput forecasts and to constrain or reduce air cargo facility footprint area, a thoroughly modern, mechanized, systematized vertical cargo consolidation and processing structure is required.
The present embodiments meet these needs.
The present embodiments are detailed below with reference to the listed Figures.